Creator of BitTorrent talks about his new live streaming technology Project Pheon, his thoughts on Silicon Valley poseurs and of course, his stance on copyright

Bram Cohen is still fighting many of the same battles he’s waged for years.

As the creator of the BitTorrent file sharing technology, Mr. Cohen has been called a lot of things: genius, pirate, copyright crusader. But he’s not one to worry about labels, he’d rather just stick to building technology.

Saturday marked the 10th anniversary of the first implementation of the BitTorrent protocol, Mr. Cohen’s revolutionary peer-to-peer technology that today moves more data around the Internet than almost any other, one which ushered in a new era of video on the Web and touched off a series of heated debates over issues of copyright and network neutrality in the digital age.

Unfortunately, many people don’t realize that in addition to the technology, BitTorrent is also the name of a company — BitTorrent Inc. –which Mr. Cohen co-founded in 2004 to help monetize his creation.

Despite more than 100 million users of the company’s software, BitTorrent Inc. is still trying to shake off its connection to piracy and establish itself as a leader in digital content delivery in a world dominated by new entrants, such as Netflix Inc. and the Hulu service.

On Saturday, we published a feature story about Mr. Cohen in the Financial Post and on the FP Tech Desk. You can read that piece in its entirety here.

However, there were a few things we had a chance to speak to Mr. Cohen about that didn’t make it into the finished article, including a discussion about his new live streaming technology Project Pheon, his thoughts on Silicon Valley poseurs and of course, his stance on copyright.

The last time I interviewed Mr. Cohen was a few years ago when I was putting together the Download Decade project for The Globe and Mail, just as BitTorrent Inc. was getting over a difficult time in the company’s history, so it was interesting to hear the progress the company has made in the interim.

Financial Post: Bram, it’s been about two years since you and I last chatted. BitTorrent Inc. is having an interesting year already in 2011, why don’t we just start off with an easy question: How are things going?

Bram Cohen: Things are going well. We have a whole lot of users and growing. We’re creating new technologies. I personally am working on peer to peer live streaming, which we’ve been doing in the wild live tests on, which are going pretty well.

FP: That’s called Project Pheon right? Can you tell me more about it? I understand it’s a live streaming technology that incorporates elements of BitTorrent technology?

BC: No. It’s peer to peer, that’s about as much as it has in common with BitTorrent protocol. I really had to design everything from the ground up for low latency. This is live, like television. Something is being broadcast live right now and everybody is watching it at a very small lag, and you’re trying to make that lag as short as possible. There are a few other benchmarks involved here. The first and most important is what the latnecy is in between when the thing happens and how long it takes to start playing on everyone’s machine. Then there’s the offload: which is the percentage of the bandwidth which comes from peers, rather than the source of the data. Then there’s the necessary headroom: which is how much extra capacity there needs to be in the swarm in order for everything to run well. This is a very very hard problem, and I’ve been working on it for close to three years now. Most of the solutions that are out there, do 90 second delays and 50% offload, and my solution does less than 10 second delays, with 99% offload. It really just involves a re-thinking of the whole protocol, because what I’m doing behaves very differently from the others.

FP: How do you envision this technology being used?

BC: Well, it’s mostly for video. It’s like television. Most Americans still spend a few hours a day watching television. It’s a good idea to just take that exact same use case and move it online, and there’s not a good solution for doing that today.

FP: So this would be the kind of thing that broadcasters could use to live stream things like sporting events and live concerts?

BC: Yeah.

FP: The last time you and I chatted, you told me about how when you created BitTorrent, you were working for a startup that had run out of money. You said you asked your friends which one of the projects you were working on they thought was the most promising and that you ended up going with the one they didn’t understand. When did you realize you really had something interesting on your hands with the BitTorrent protocol?

BC: I realized early on that I had something interesting on my hands. There’s this way I have of thinking about the world, which is kind of the engineer’s way of thinking about the world. To an engineer, a power plant doesn’t look like the thing it looks like to everybody else. Most people look at a power plant and they see a big building, with another building that does this and another that does that. To an engineer, what they see is a bunch of thermodynamics equations telling you how much power is going into the plant from what source and with what efficiency it is being converted into electricity and coming out. That’s the calculation there. If you sit down and run the numbers, and know how to run them, you can see which sources of power are really promising and which ones aren’t.

But in terms of this paper and pencil calculation, BitTorrent was very compelling right off the bat. The calculation was really pretty tirivial, which was that there’s plenty of upload capacity out there. It’s not being used, there’s lots of it, and it should be used. It’s ridiculous not to. The problem is a very difficult logistical one of, how do you actually make it all work? I went and decided to pursue an architecture where I made some fundamental architectural decisions which made it so that it really worked well. But it also made it so that it was really hard to get it working at all. Which is what I’m doing with live [Project Pheon] these days. [The product department of BitTorrent Inc.] keeps pestering me and saying, Bram, can’t you just make the latency 30 seconds and get it done sooner? Well no, it’s not a bunch of trade offs that I made. I’m not taking the traditional approach and improving it, I’m doing something that’s fundamentally new and the problem is getting my thing to work at all. If I get it working, it will work really well, and that’s what I did with BitTorrent in the first place. So I knew early on that it had tremendous potential, but it was only after I had the first few deployments that went over a few hundred people and nothing really interesting happened that I felt confident that things were going somewhere.

The first version I released in 2001 had this really inscrutible interface where you had to manually copy secure hashes and manually set up peers, and it wasn’t recognizable with what BitTorrent is today. Sometime in late 2002 I actually went and made it have the interface that you recognize today, which was kind of radical in many ways. You don’t pick who you’re peering with in BitTorrent. At the time, there was an awful lot of setting up friend graphs and deciding who you wanted to exchange with and who you trusted, and I just got rid of that completely.

FP: Was there ever a time that the growth of the protocol surprised you? Obviously you’re now over 100 million users.

BC: That’s just our two software clients. Lots of others that use the BitTorrent protocol. In terms of usage, I don’t know. So many people pride themselves on these social goals; their importance in the world and how much of a difference they’re making for so many people. I’m more of a technical person. I pride myself on making things happen and solving problems. After [BitTorrent] really started working and it exploded, I was like, “Oh, good, it’s working now.” I’m not one to thump my chest and talk about how great I am because it has whatever number of users.

FP: Absolutely. Although I’m sure there are a ton of startups in and around Silicon Valley that would love to have 100 million users.

BC: It’s really amazing the valuations that some startups that are just announcing that they have 10 million accounts registered (laughs). And that’s 10 million ever. And we have 100 million monthly active. They’re not even comprable numbers.

FP: That leads us to an interesting point. As you look out at the state of the technology world right now, there’s no shortage of analysts who will tell you that we’re right at the start of another bubble in the tech world. How does it feel when you see these other companies with these kinds of valuations?

BC: Well, it doesn’t hurt me. It makes me think: “Hey, maybe I can get some money.” (laughs). Whether or not there’s a bubble, I don’t know. But to the extent that there’s ever a bubble, it’s kind of a good thing … Whenever there’s a bubble in tech, the worst that can happen — and it’s not like the housing bubble that was secured and required a bank bailout to fix it — the worst that can happen is that a bunch of investors get disappointing returns. They’re investors who were investing money that was supposed to be risky, so there can’t really be any particularly disastrous fallout afterewards. Always when this happens, a lot of money gets invested in tech. More money invested in tech I think is a good thing, so I’m not going to go around complaining about it.

FP: What’s it like being at one company for this long and seeing the changes that have happened in and around the Silicon Valley?

BC: There have definitely been some bumps in the road around here. We almost went under in late 2008. TechCrunch had a recent article about “The New Silicon Valley DoucheBag.” It’s funny, when I first started working on BitTorrent, what I did was crazy. I said I’m going to go and work on this thing and I’m going to live off of credit cards and have no plan, no business model, no nothing. I’m just going to work on something that I think has potential full time for years. Part of what I did was really thought of as crazy because it was two years before I got any significant real world deployment. And I was okay with that, because that’s what made sense as far as the product went and I didn’t do the minimum viable product thing … But these days, this is considered the coolest thing to do. So somehow I became cool. I don’t know how I became cool, I’m not cool. I’m inherently uncool. But somehow, the way I’ve lived my life is now considered very cool and the thing to do is to be an entrepreneur. A lot of people are doing this as kind of a poseur thing, which is kind of obnoxious.

But the positive part of that is the technologies are mature enough and the markets are mature enough now that it’s really possible for someone to legitimately start a dot-com company without being a hard core technical themselves. There are companies that are started by product or marketing people, who know something really well, and they start a company based on what they want to do, and they don’t have to be technical people. It helps a lot if they are or if they bring on someone who is a hard core technical just to build things, but it’s not an immediate weeder. Nowadays, things are a lot more mature so there’s a lot more diversity of what companies look like.

FP: We’ve chatted before about how there have been some ups and downs for you guys with the company. Have you ever over the course of time thought about selling the company or the rights to the technology and just moving on to do something else?

BC: Well, I could have just pushed out a whole bunch of malware back in 2004 and retired. It would have been pretty easy. A lot of people would have done that. But I didn’t want to do that. Most companies like us have lots of people beating down their door with all kinds of crazy offers to buy them. There’s a lot of people being worried about us. We’re perceived negatively, frequently, and perceived to have a lot more risk than we do from a legal standpoint. This is kind of silly. We make core technology for the Internet, and that’s a good thing. We’re not at very much legal risk. But we’re working on changing that perception and expanding out. We’re also continuing to expand. We’ve expanded our user base tremendously, we’re working on moving into new revenue streams and really leveraging our brand as well.

FP: One of the things we talked about last time was that you thought the biggest misconception about BitTorrent Inc. was that so many people didn’t even realize there was a BitTorrent Inc. How has that changed over the past couple of years?

BC: I think a lot of people still don’t realize there’s a BitTorrent Inc. (laughs) Our software products are actually proprietary; they’re free in that you can download them and use them for free, but we don’t publish the source code. No particular planning around that one. We acquired the code base we’re using now and it was proprietary when we got it, so it’s still proprietary now. But we’ve continued to maintain it and keep it on the cutting edge and it’s actually increased in market share over time, and there haven’t been any problems with that. I think most people don’t think about where it comes from and how it’s maintained (laughs).

FP: Does it frustrate you at all that if you talk to people, most probably know what BitTorrent is, but most people don’t know there’s a company by the same name?

BC: I don’t know, it’s good to get credit for things sometimes, but I actually get fanboyed a lot (laughs). I have a decent amount of celebrity status. It’s really annoying; I have enough celebrity status that I get fanboyed a lot, but a small enough amount that when I mention it, people laugh and roll their eyes like, you little twerp. They don’t say that, but that’s what they’re thinking.

FP: I’ve got to ask about the perceived connections to piracy. How do you feel that connection has affected the growth of the company, and are you any closer to shaking off that mantle?

BC: It creates problems obviously. I kinda view copyright as this fight I didn’t ask to be in. People expect me to be some kind of copyright crusader or something, and I’m not. I’m a technologist. I build technology and I’ve been sucked into this crap, which on some level I don’t really care about all that much. The thing that really frustrates me is that there’s this delirious perception that somehow making your stuff not available online is better in some way. There’s an awful lot of movies, most movies there is no way of getting them online. Period. Full stop. They are not available from any authorized source online at all, and if [the studios] wanted to make them available from an authorized source, we would happily provide the technology to help them do that a whole lot cheaper for them to do it otherwise. But they just want to make it not available at all online period and then blame us when somebody else goes ahead and makes it available for what frankly is much much better end user experience than they have made from sanctioned sources that cost money. I think it’s ridiculous for someone to complain under that situation, they’ve made their own problem for themselves and are blaming us for it.

FP: There was a time when the world jumped on BitTorrent back in 2003 and 2004, and yet the content industries have never really latched onto the technology. BitTorrent Inc. has worked with various studios in the past and you’re working with some smaller content producers today, but on a whole, the record industry and Hollywood never really adopted BitTorrent. Is that at all disappointing to you?

BC: It’s very disappointing to me and to the extent that we worked with Hollywood in the past … basically they were deals that were designed to fail. They were not things that could work. They were deals that were designed to help them make money off the deal, but they weren’t designed to make an ongoing functional business. And you look at Netflix, which is supposed to be this great thing for the content industry, and they tried to get rid of Netflix. Netflix used a loophole. It was only because they have been using a loophole and been successful at it that they’ve been successful at all.

FP: As you look back on the first decade of BitTorrent, do you think BitTorrent has lived up to its potential?

BC: Well, it’s been doing well so far obviously, but it has a lot more potential. It has the potential to be used by everything. Everything that’s being used for video distribution online. YouTube’s not using it right now, and it offers really low quality bitrates as a result. So it’s doing a lot. It’s hard to complain about what it has done but there’s certainly a lot more that can be done in the future.

If Friday's gains are anything to go by, investors are champing at the bit

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